What is Pirate Attack!?

I wrote Pirate Attack as a teenager, living in Newport, Oregon, in the mid-1980's. I was inspired to make the game when I read an article about pirates in Cricket magazine. I was an avid reader of sci-fi, such as Isaac Asimov, and so I decided to do a mashup of pirates with space opera. -- You know, this made sense to me at the time.

I wrote the game on a 512K Mac Plus. I painstakingly hand-copied several of the pirate illustrations by eye from Cricket, one pixel at a time, into MacPaint, and then copy-and-pasted the final results into World Builder. All the other graphics I drew by hand, also in MacPaint. Some of the sound effects were included with World Builder, others others were from shareware disks that I voraciously acquired on those occasions when my parents were willing to drive me to meetings of the Macintosh Users Group in Corvallis, Oregon, an hour's drive away.

I reall that the code I wrote was very detailed. For example, there was room-by-room code to display an overlay whenever the sunglasses were worn. Also I tried to include lots of variations on verbs, such as "use", so that the player hopefully wouldn't get stuck on vocabulary.

I put a lot of effort into writing an extensive help system, which is described in detail in the game instructions -- but, being unfamiliar at the time with even basic concepts of UI/UX, I mentioned the help system only at the very end of the instructions, and so in retrospect, most people probably were unaware that it existed.

I released the game in 1987 as $1 shareware on a floppy drive, which I distributed at a Corvallis MUG meeting. Soon afterward, I left Oregon to attend college on the other side of the country. And then, for the next 35 years, I didn't know whether any people had actually played Pirate Attack. I didn't receive any shareware dollars. I kept the game usable at home on successor Macs and eventually emulators, as a living memory of something I was proud of creating as a teenager.

Then in November 2022, I received the most amazing message on LinkedIn: "Hi, this is random but I wondered if you were the creator of a 1987 mac world builder game called Pirate Attack? If so I just wanted to tell you that I played this game constantly in 8th grade/1991, and have never forgotten it. I probably owe you a dollar." So I want to thank you, MP, for making not just my day, but the day of a teenager long ago sitting in his living room in front of a glowing Mac Plus screen, listening through headphones to a Brahms overture on a portable Sony CD player, point-and-clicking the way to a connection 35 years in the future.

If others might be interested in playing Pirate Attack, if for no other reason then to remember simpler fun times at the dawn of the person computer age, I hope you will enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it. I will upload a walkthrough to this web page, in case you'd like to speed-run through the game. The end of the game displays a hand-drawn animation which I modeled after the sequence in Star Trek 3 where the Starship Enterprise exits space dock.

Thank you also to whoever uploaded Pirate Attack to Macintosh Repository in the first place. It is wonderfully satisfying to know all these years later that something I contributed to the Mac community was, indeed, seen and enjoyed by others.

Zeba Kimmel, May 2023

zeb[at]sloan.mit.edu

 

Download Pirate Attack! for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 1.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac